California State University (CSU) officials announced Monday they will temporarily close admissions, as a result of budget cuts, and will require most of the 23 CSU campuses to freeze enrollment for the next spring semester of 2013. The majority of students locked out of enrolling in the Spring are mainly transfers from community colleges who are overwhelmingly students of color, according to CSU records.

California State University will accept no new admissions for the spring semester of 2013 - with a few exceptions - as part of a drastic cost-cutting strategy to reduce enrollment by about 16,000 students next spring, officials said Monday.

Another 20,000 to 25,000 qualified students could be barred from attending CSU in the 2013-14 academic year if voters reject a proposed tax measure that hasn’t yet qualified for the November ballot.

Failure of the tax measure would trigger an automatic funding cut of $200 million for CSU under a scenario proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown. That loss would come on top of a $750 million budget hit that CSU already took this year.

“I feel let down and a sense of abandonment,” Vivian Carchi, a community college student with plans to attend to Cal State University Northridge (CSUN) told The Daily Sundial.

“CSUN was my go to college because of its location and relatively low prices (compared to other State Universities),” Carchi went on to tell the Sundial. “Now my plan, my future, has a huge wrench just stuck in there. We are told that we need an education so we can have more opportunities to be successful. But how can we achieve that when The California State University system is literally shutting their school doors in our faces?”

Student won’t be the only ones affected.

Kim Geron, vice president of the California Faculty Association, told the SF Chronicle the cuts are “horrific,” and that last time this happened there were teachers who not only lost their health benefits but their homes too.

Read this online at http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/03/calif_state_schools_slash_spring_admission_students_of_color_hit_hardest.html

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